Twenty years ago, Dr. Darshan Shah was working long days as a surgeon, putting his career and patients first and taking care of himself last. He developed an autoimmune disease, had a genetic predisposition to diabetes and high blood pressure. He was gaining weight because he wasn’t eating right or moving his body properly.
It was in his own search to get healthy that he discovered how functional medicine (a holistic approach to health care) could help reverse or prevent disease.
“Using nutrition, exercise and sleep, as well as just taking care of myself, combined with functional medicine, really turned my health around, and that’s why we started Next Health,” Darshan says. “Bringing all that under one roof, so you have one place to go to get healthy, not 10 different places.”
He says Next Health has four main pillars: lifestyle medicine, functional medicine, preventative medicine and longevity medicine. The California-based clinic opened its first Nashville franchise in the Prima at Paseo South Gulch building earlier this year, with a Green Hills location under construction and two more planned for the area.
Redefining Health
Nashville small business owners Kim and Scott Crosbie had retired. But when they decided to start looking for a new venture, Next Health caught their attention as the perfect next step.
“We realized, if I’m going to go back and do something, [I’m] definitely going to find a couple of things,” Scott says. “One, that we really have a passion and purpose for. Two, that we could actually give back.” The couple became Next Health founding franchise owners, opening locations in Nashville and soon to open in Charlotte, N.C. “This is about us really enjoying what we’re doing, creating a culture for our employees, and even a wellness culture for members and people that come in here,” Scott adds.
Scott’s passion for wellness and longevity started after his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He wanted to find ways to ensure he was at his healthiest for as long as possible. “We thought we were really healthy, but half of what I knew really wasn’t accurate or correct,” he says. “So we started changing everything.”
Now, after years of practicing a functional health routine, Scott regularly tests among the top longevity performers in the world — ranking no. 18 in the Rejuvenation Olympics, a competition that challenges participants to reverse their so-called “biological age,” in June.
The competition compares your chronological age to your biological age using bloodwork markers and other measurements. Scott’s best individual test showed he was aging 0.65 years for every one calendar year. At 55 years old, that would make his biological age about 36 years. But it has taken a lot of work and experimentation to find what works best for his body.
The Leading Edge
Darshan says that once many of Next Health’s clients get their lifestyle in order, they want to know what the next step is. That’s where longevity technology, such as plasma exchange and stem cell therapy, comes into play.
Therapeutic plasma exchange treatment purports to flush toxins out of the bloodstream, and Next Health is one of the few places in Nashville offering it. “The procedure … gets rid of a massive amount of [what’s] living in your plasma and replaces it with new fluid,” Darshan says. He suggests this may help people with chronic conditions and inflammation, but research by the National Institutes of Health is ongoing. (Be sure to talk to your primary care provider before trying a new treatment.)
The clinic offers other cutting-edge therapies, like cryotherapy, infrared therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and IV and vitamin treatments.
Holistic Health
Darshan says he believes the country needs two systems — one for disaster and disease care and another “real health care system” focused on helping people feel good in their daily lives.
“I think when you have these two systems that can work together, you really can turn around this horrible tide of just people getting sicker,” Darshan says. “There needs to be thousands of clinics like Next Health. I always say: For every primary care doctor clinic in every city, we should have one Next Health clinic.”
Nurse practitioner Nathan Byrnes, head of medicine for Nashville’s Next Health clinics, transitioned into functional medicine from primary care because he also believed there was more to health care than just treating issues with medication. “I really just started to dive down,” Nathan says. “Looking at things from a basic level … fixing the root cause and getting people off of medication.”
He says the environment at Next Health is open and welcoming. There’s time for patients to deep dive into their labs and for care providers to help them understand what’s going on — and that creates trust. “We really preach on patient advocacy as well. You are in total control of your health,” Nathan says. “My job is to educate you and kind of be the coach and then let you make an informed decision once you have all the information.”
He also appreciates that Next Health aims to stay at the forefront of longevity medicine, always advancing its practices to help clients.
“Our tagline on every Next Health location is: Health is not just the absence of disease. It is the abundance of vitality,” Darshan says. “And that’s what we’re trying to create.”
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